Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Do SSDs improve your FPS? The answer is still NO!

Modern PC games are getting hungrier for resources each year.
A gamer is known to the fact and as such often willing to walk the extra mile
in order to get the extra performance out of his/her PC. While upgrading to a
faster graphics card based on a newer GPU architecture provides the most
surefire way of getting more in form of FPS, moving to a faster CPU or even a
specialized network solution often boosts gaming performance. But whether or
not an SSD (Solid state Drive) can be perceived as a potential upgrade for a
gamer has remained a debatable topic over the years! If you ask the question to
a manufacturer/vendor, they would possibly tell you that SSDs are the best
thing that could happen to a gamer; but in reality things aren’t that simple!
From time to time we have seen benchmarks clearly proving that games for the
most part don’t benefit from SSDs. The latest dataset in this regard comes from
HardOCP and goes inline with our prior observations!

The good folks over at [H] are in process of “upgrading” the
storage of their video card test bench from conventional mechanical hard disks
to SSDs. But before ditching their good old WD black 640GB mechanical
drive in favor of a Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB, they thought to conduct a
head-to-head comparison between those two in terms of pure gaming performance. They
ran some of the most demanding tittles you can find today including- Battlefield 4 multiplayer, ARMA 3, Crysis 3 and FarCry 3 and measured
the FPS (frames per second). You can read about their findings in detail here,
but for those lazy enough to do so – we can help! With every other hardware being the same, the
test produced almost identical result on both platforms with no apparent
advantage to the SSD! More importantly the author didn’t find any distinguishable
pattern in regard of game playing smoothness and fluidity. This is good news as
there have been claims of stuttering and lags on HDD which doesn’t seem to be
the case here!

This isn’t surprising once you understand how a game works
within a modern PC. Almost all the games load everything necessary to run the
frames on-screen into the memory, given there is enough of it. This is
generally done at the start-up and/or when you load a previously saved game.
CPU sends the data to the graphics card (GPU) to be processed, presented and
updated in form of full screen bitmaps imagery or frames. Any modern graphics
card comes with enough video memory or V-RAM as it is often called to hold all
the frames to drive the display along with all other 3D vector data, texture
files, depth maps and overlays. Very few games can saturate 2GB of V-RAM which
is becoming more of a standard for today’s graphics cards and with everything
being loaded into the memory the operating speed of storage sub-system becomes
a moot point!

One thing we should keep in the mind that Brent@ [H]OCP measured
only the in game performance – not the load/save time something that can surely
benefit from the very low access time of SSDs as a game still needs to access
the HDD/SSD under those scenarios. Also any game that does selective and
dynamic (on the fly) loading of textures and maps has the potential of
performance boost from SSDs but such games are rare, particularly in the single
player realm.

Once again these results confirm what enthusiasts have
already known for years – hard disks don’t bottleneck gaming performance. True,
an SSD will thoroughly enhance your day to day computing experience, radically
shorten file transfer times and provide you with lightning fast boot sequence but
it won’t give you more FPS for the money! If gaming is what you mostly do with
your PC then mechanical hard drives will do the job just fine and perhaps even
save a few bucks to spend on a new graphics card!